Harry Mathews was the first American member of the French group Oulipo. He unfortunately passed away this year, making THE SOLITARY TWIN his final novel. It's a fantastic, kaleidoscopic view of two visitors –– twins–– who arrive at a picturesque town. As their identities unfold, townsfolk are left to wonder –– are the two really twins, or is there only one "twin"? At a brief 160 pages, this book is just long enough for Mathews to really show off his thoughtful, moving writing.

Pushkin's Japanese Novella series is incredibly cool to begin with; it's thoughtful and well-curated. In the interest of efficiency, I'll restrain myself and recommend only SPRING GARDEN for now. Taro, a divorcee, lives alone in a half-empty apartment complex, each flat named after a cycle in the Chinese Zodiac. SPRING GARDEN tells the story of his last year in the complex and his investigations into the house next door. Though not a mystery, necessarily, this book has a narrative grip that's surprisingly strong considering its tiny size. Perfect single-sitting read for any occasion, from a picnic in the park to a bath or a rainy afternoon coffee-shop visit.

Whether or not you've hopped on the craze of Guillermo del Toro's new mysterious-sea-creature-love-story THE SHAPE OF WATER, dive into the theme with MRS. CALIBAN. New Directions has unearthed Ingalls' novel from the 1980's and situated it firmly in 2018, where it casts a new light on the genre of sci fi as we see it today. With touches of classic characters like King Kong or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, MRS CALIBAN is an eerie yet zippy ride.

Translated into English for the first time, Other Press brings us this 1930’s Turkish author’s beautiful little masterpiece of interwar relations. An office worker finds the handwritten memoir of his dying coworker; in it, his coworker’s memoir of a love affair in Berlin. Compared to THE GREAT GATSBY, its incredible portrayal of smart, disaffected youth and they ways in which they grow up adds so much to our selection of translated literature from Turkey.

This book is an epic. Mano Medium is our protagonist in the town of Pie Time, where he lives with his mother. As townsfolk start dying, leaving objects behind them, Mano collects and collects the detritus of death and loss. Weird, surreal, Barthelme-esque.

A narrative of a complicated biracial Mississippi family. It confronts our country's history of racism in a way that is so all-encompassing as to transcend time; past, present, and future, living and dead, humans, plants, and animals, all are necessary to tell the story of America from slavery to chain gangs to Jim Crow to Trayvon Martin. All this in rich, lyrical prose (seriously).

Galera shapes this book around boyhood memories, but refuses stillness or contemplation. Readers encounter a young man's life first through the whizzing speed of his bicycle trek through the city, and then through the visceral and sometimes brutal memories he shared with friends in Esplanada. Throughout, the high of danger is easily portrayed in succinct, smooth prose.

I absolutely loved this new speculative novel from Karen Tidbeck. In a world where objects are dependent on being spoken into solidity (literally; forget to re-label a suitcase and it will turn to mush), a bureaucratic colony worker discovers her own desire for abstraction and unsureness. Much like China Miéville's EMBASSYTOWN and THE CITY & THE CITY, or Renee Gladman's Ravicka Trilogy, Tidbeck forms a plot out of the inadequacies and subjectivities of language, creating new possibilities for both the environment and the characters.

Don't be put off by this book's theoretical linguistic themes or Science Fiction designation. AMATKA is a serious plot-driven mystery/adventure. The characters are immediately subtle but personable, the story is invigorating, and the landscape isn't too far off from our own to feel endeared to.

Especially in a political space such as ours, it seems fitting to spend time with a book that so experimentally digs into what objectivity, truth, and individuality are (and could possibly be).

I loved this debut novel from Batuman. She spins a college narrative into an exploration of language, international relations, and communication/romance over the early internet. Also, a compelling redux of Dostoyevsky! Definite winner.

Fabre takes an enigmatic figure (17th-century Spanish nun Sor Juana) and pulls her up through scholars' attempts to demystify her into a place of super contemporary critical thought through poetry. Through his comparison of her to various monsters (Sphinx, Phoenix, etc.), he remythologizes her AND the artifice of writing itself. If this sounds complicated, it is – but somehow contained and fascinating. The translator's note at the end (by Houston poet and organizer John Pluecker), rather than trying to lay bare the text, instead nourishes the reader's sense of enigma and awkwardness. How is such a short chapbook so complete and satisfying?

Will is a PhD student getting his degree in film studies when he finds out a horror film is being made of a terrifying experience he had as a young adult. Forced to undergo gay conversion camp run by his mother's younger sister, he and four other boys made an attempted escape – to disastrous effect. Now an adult, he must confront his childhood at the camp while parsing through the stories of his mother's backwoods family. Is the grisly slasher an exploitative excuse for a resurgence of gay bashing? Or is it a queer-authored reclamation of the hateful violence he and the four other boys underwent? And what ever happened to the other boys? This book is a wonderfully multi-layered debut that rethinks agency in the narrative of queer violence.

NIGHTWOOD is fascinatingly decadent, both in style and in setting. Character development is at its natural peak in this 1930s portrait of a woman and her sense of society, which crumbles even as she interacts with its members. Though the narrative is laced with a sense of doom, the absurdity of the characters' sense of class and poise lends a level of hilarity that is utterly original.

While I loved Qiu Miaojin's other published book, LAST WORDS FROM MONTMARTRE, NOTES OF A CROCODILE is comparatively a master work. More closely driven by narrative than the letter-based NOTES, LAST WORDS focuses on a college student who, despite being a high achiever, feels like "pure carrion inside." She tackles the dissolution of the human body, both metaphorical and literal, through lengthy monologues and the occasional news reference to the waning crocodile population ("humans with reptile characteristics, not reptiles with human characteristics"). At the same time, the narrative is grounded by her romantic relationship with an older student, along with a host of other college outcasts with whom she spends her time. Miaojin's book turns a typical college story on its head while blurring the lines between memoir, fiction, and fantasy.

BOOK OF JOAN is a brilliant piece of literary speculation poised to take up the mantle of the HANDMAID'S TALE. Yuknavitch reimagines our history and bodies from the ground up while retaining an deeper parallel between our world and her own: the abuse of power in the hands of the wrong people.

I'm still not sure how Yuknavitch manages to craft so many incredible characters in such a small space: the protagonist, a master of skin grafting who burns Joan of Arc's story onto her body; her best friend, a raucus jokester in a post-sexual era; Joan herself, a young but incredibly strong environmental activist; Jean de Men, the technology-reliant captain in power hiding a deep and telling secret; and a host of others who enrich the text in original, fascinating ways.

Anne Garreta is a spectacular writer of the underground and the after-dark. In this memoir-slash-essay-series, Garreta turns back to memories of past trysts. While her last Oulipian novel, THE SPHYNX, was highly structured, NOT ONE DAY follows a slightly more lenient train-of-thought pattern, without ever losing the sense of high intellect that Garreta brings to everything she writes. Each vignette flickers smoothly between thoughtful ruminations on memory and moodily sensual encounters with strangers and friends alike.

What a remarkable storyline, bound between these beautiful compact covers. SUCH SMALL HANDS is Transit Books' first publication, and it portends a unique, gorgeous voice for the press. Marina, a young girl, has just lost both her parents to a car accident and ends up in the hands of an orphanage. The narrative transitions between her voice and that of the other girls at the orphanage, who merge into a single solemn chorus. Andrés Barba captures the nighttime world of young girls' thoughts with unsettling elegance.

HERE is an understated graphic novel that explores the history of a single room through past millennia. Context grows through characters' appearances in frames that appear overlaid and out of chronological order. McGuire uses the visual form to expertly dig deeper into the artifice of the graphic novel, family history, and time itself. HERE builds, elegantly, from a series of flat images into a gorgeous, echoing, spiraling narrative.

RECITATION charts the travels of a mysterious traveler and voice actress after she arrives at an empty train station in Europe. As the book's pages creep by, the lone woman's narrative becomes ever more tangled in her personal identity, family past, and the imagined collective past of city dwellers in general. Bae Suah weaves a lyrical exploration of self-discovery through the eyes of what could be any number of identities. This is a remarkable book that manages both experimentation and nonlinearity and thoughtful, deliberate plot.

This book emerged to me from the mists in the downtown public library. I grabbed it, ran out, and haven’t looked back since (no, seriously, the book is about three months overdue at this point, but it’s still on my nightstand). Apparently it was a cult favorite in 90’s lesbian Taiwan as well, where it circulated from hand to hand as a sheath of photocopies for years before being published.

LAST WORDS is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Organized as a series of letters, all vaguely autobiographical, it charts the genderqueer main character’s last few months of travel, love, and heartbreak before suicide. Each letter is a gut-wrenching gem. Don’t forget to get a pack of tissues on your way home.

THE ROAD meets FIGHT CLUB in this apocalyptic Minotaur myth-turned-road novel. After the electricity goes out in his town, a car mechanic begins a seemingly endless journey to reach his ailing father. However, as miles travelled and his exhaustion both mount, the story winds in and out of reality and time. The narrator’s parallel quests for his father, love, and a destination, along with the strange company he finds along the way, pull together to form a marvelous, thoughtful mindbender of a novel.

Yoshie’s father has just died in a suicide pact and left Yoshie and her mother to deal with their grief by moving into a new neighborhood. However, Yoshie’s father keeps haunting her nightmares with a message. Banana Yoshimoto, as always, manages to merge potentially isolating introspection with a beautiful cast of characters and regular intervals of unexplained fabulist occurrences.